“You talk as if you flew over the Alps every morning before breakfast,” said O’Mera, with a laugh. “I didn’t know you had even been off the ground.”
“Did I say I had been, eh?” Cantor said, a trifle tipsily. “Did I say I was a flyer? Tell me that? No, I just told you how to fly. Very different thing. Everybody knows how to fly. Books are full of it. I could read it out of books, couldn’t I?”
“I suppose you could,” said O’Mera, a bit belligerently, “but you didn’t say that you did. What you said sounded as if you knew—like it was first hand.”
“Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. What’s the difference, anyhow?” He drained his glass and looked about for the waiter. “You wanted to be told, and I told you. And I told you right.... Who said I was ever up in the air?”
O’Mera shrugged his shoulders. His Irish head was hard, and liquor had a way of battering against it futilely.
“And who said I wasn’t?” Cantor wanted to know.
“Search me,” said O’Mera.
“Well, let me tell you something, O’Mera, something about the Alps.... They can be flown over—because they have been flown over. Yes, sir, right from one side to the other.... And who was the first man that did it? Tell me that.”
“I haven’t the least idea. Ask yourself the answer.”
“What difference does it make—so long as somebody was the first to do it? Somebody had to be first, before there could be a second. First comes first—second comes second.” He emptied another glass and set a cigarette unsteadily in his lips. All the while he peered at O’Mera with supercilious and sardonic humor. “That’s fact—isn’t it?”